The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist

by Simon Winchester

  The team then packed the truck, first with the goods they were to deliver, and then with their own supplies—forty-gallon drums of fuel,20 all the imaginable tools and spare parts they might need, camp beds, Primus stoves, the apparently purposeless lengths of string and oilcloth and sheets of tin without which no self-respecting Englishman would travel anywhere remote, and a very great deal of canned food—meats by Hormel and Fray Bentos, biscuits by Huntley & Palmer, mustard by Colman’s or Keen’s, as well as bottles of the undrinkable Paterson’s Camp coffee, the rather better Fry’s cocoa, and Cadbury’s chocolate bars, seemingly by the ton.

  They needed only to acquire the necessary permits: authorization notes had to be obtained from nine different organizations—the Foreign Office, the Transport Bureau, the army garrison headquarters, and other arms of China’s bureaucracy. Also, dozens of photographs had to be signed and countersigned in police stations and visa offices—a process that took the exasperated Needham several days. But eventually, at the end of the first week of August—armed with a bundle of chop-covered, seal-emblazoned, signed and sworn and notarized and diplomatically rendered official documents—they were ready to go.

  They left Chongqing in what initially would be a two-truck convoy. Needham was in his own vehicle, with H. T. Huang and three other passengers: an American geologist, Ed Beltz, who was cadging a ride; the writer and teacher Robert Payne, who also needed a short lift to see a dying friend in Chengdu; and a young Chinese woman, Liao Hongying, a chemist educated at Oxford’s Somerville College, who would act as Needham’s amanuensis and provide him—though almost certainly platonically—with the female company he craved. She was extremely beautiful, as well as intellectually accomplished, and there had been much nudging and winking within the mission when the roguish counsellor had first selected her. (Considering what eventually befell Miss Liao, as we shall see, the whisperings at the embassy turned out to be most ironically misdirected.)

  The converted Chevrolet ambulance in which Needham traveled to northwest China, pictured during a repair stop on the Silk Road.

  In another embassy Chevrolet truck would be Sir Eric Teichman, who was being driven to a northern Chinese border city so that he could head west on another epic overland journey toward India, from where he would eventually fly home to Britain. The departure date for the two vehicles was set for August 7, a Saturday. It was expected that on this, their first Chinese adventure, the party would be staying away from base for eight weeks or so, little more.

  For the duration of their expedition the Dunhuang caves were at the front of their minds: reaching them was the ultimate goal, no matter what the hardships. But there were other things to see on the way—other Chinese marvels. The first of these, which Needham managed to visit just a week after he left Chongqing, involved a subject that has captivated China since the beginnings of its history: water.

  China is, basically, a gigantic plateau. tilted gently from west to east. The biggest of the Chinese rivers, the catchment of nearly all others, flow almost entirely in that general direction, from their sources in the Himalayas in the west to their estuaries on the eastern ocean. The rivers swell each springtime as a result of the melting snows and soon afterward become swollen again with rains during the southern monsoon. As a result, questions related to flooding and water control became, almost from the nation’s beginnings, a matter of overarching importance.

  And this was not just local importance. The Chinese had long ago realized that, so far as flooding was concerned, local interests had to be subordinated to a wider national need. Swollen rivers did their damage or brought their benefits to huge tracts of land and to large numbers of people who, if they were prudent, and whatever their local loyalties, ought to come together to bring each river under control. So the creation of what one might call a supra-local national water authority, and a large bureaucracy to populate it, became of great importance early on in China’s history.

  As it happened, the immense power that such a body eventually acquired in early China helped to strengthen the fledgling imperial system as a whole—and it quickly became evident that whoever controlled the empire’s rivers simultaneously wielded enormous power over the empire. Some sinologists go farther: the historically despotic nature of Chinese imperial rulers derived from one abiding reality—that the keepers of China’s hydraulics had the wherewithal to do with China much as they pleased.

  Water engineers were given formidable powers, and when they were successful, they earned formidable reputations. One of these engineers, in the Qin dynasty, was Li Bing, who created a monster irrigation project on the Min River 2,300 years ago: astonishingly, it still stands. Part of Needham’s plan when he set out that August was to inspect this structure: it was to be his introduction to the fact that ancient China could not only do small things very well—such as grafting plums and inventing the abacus and the magnetic compass—but also make achievements on a gargantuan scale.

  Getting to the dam site turned out to be agonizingly slow. The men and Miss Liao traveled through the heat and dust of the Red Basin as slowly as sloths. Within the first moments of leaving Chongqing, they had been presented with a sight that unsettled their Chinese drivers. A funeral cortege passed directly in front of Sir Eric Teichman’s truck. It turned out that the chairman of the Chinese Republic, Lin Sen, had died the previous week, and while climbing a hill on the way out of town the little convoy was forced to stop and wait for an hour as the white-robed mourners edged by. Teichman’s driver complained that this was an omen: so somber a delay must mean that his journey—maybe everyone’s journey—was ill-fated.

  The village of Yongqiang, which now is just a ten-minute drive west of Chongqing, took Needham and his trucks took more than eight hours to reach. By the time the sun was setting on Saturday evening his little convoy had bumped and strained over only sixty miles, reaching the town of Neijiang. They stayed that night at the China Travel Service inn, which

  in contrast to the old-fashioned Chinese inns is very clean (and there is no insect life to be found in their comfortable modern beds). In the old inns the beds consist of a just a few bare planks and the traveller is expected to bring his own bedding. Modern sanitation has of course never been heard of. In the old northern regions the beds, called kang in Chinese, are platforms made of clay which stand about two feet from the floor. A fire is supposed to burn underneath all night but invariably expires about three or four a.m. leaving one to freeze until dawn. The primitive central heating device can be temperamental in other ways; I have known it catch fire on occasion, and destroy the clothes of one of my Chinese colleagues.

  Whether his own clothes caught fire or his truck broke down—it was already leaking oil, and the radiator was dripping—we do not know, but Needham made no progress on Sunday. He opted instead to meet and have dinner with a Chinese cavalry colonel whose card he had been given, who turned out to have been educated at Saumur, and who spoke impeccable French. On Monday morning Needham went on a side trip to buy fuel—ninety gallons of power alcohol and an additional ten gallons of absolute alcohol, which he planned to cut with some low-octane gasoline he had bought in Chongqing. He irritatedly described the road toward the distant blue mountains as “rough going,”21 though he was charmed to find someone selling sugar plums. He also bought apples and a basket of tomatoes, then managed to avoid the normally compulsory police check on the main northbound road, arriving in Chengdu just before suppertime, just in time to allow his mechanic to rush the flagging truck to a repair shop.

  Then finally the blue range of mountains stood ahead, rising abruptly before them, with the Min River coursing out of a chasm with terrific speed. Needham knew the most important statistics—that the Min fell 12,000 feet from its headwaters in only 400 miles, so that it flowed down an average gradient of thirty feet every mile, which in riverine terms is a formula for exceptional danger. He knew also that in 250 BC the redoubtable Li Bing had worked to tame and harness the Min, creating the structure that
stood before him now, which visitors before and since have felt should be listed as one of the wonders of the world.

  The site is called Dujiangyan. As an irrigation project, it may not seem to deserve being ranked alongside the Pyramids or the Taj Mahal, but it is actually one of mankind’s more extraordinary achievements. Needham liked to quote, approvingly, the ancient Roman engineer Sextus Julius Frontinus, who wrote famously in the first century after Christ that his aqueducts were indispensable, and would be remembered long after “the idle pyramids, or the useless, though famous, works of the Greeks.”

  Needham liked this quotation not simply because Frontinus was right about the Egyptians and the Greeks but also because his achievements in Rome had been made three full centuries after those of Li Bing in China. Moreover, unlike the highfalutin monuments beside the Nile and the Yamuna, Dujiangyan had been made purely for the common good, and it still works today just as it was designed to work, whereas many Roman aqueducts lie in ruins. The fact that Dujiangyan was still working excited Needham most.

  In 250 BC Li Bing had been appointed governor of the province of Shu—modern-day Sichuan—under the kingdom of Qin, during the unstable period of the so-called Warring States, and shortly before the formation of the unified Qin dynasty, from which the name China is derived. Like everyone, he was only too well aware of the Min’s deadly caprices. It was a river that either ran half-dry in the summer, leaving the paddy farmers of the plains starved for water, or else, more commonly, flooded uncontrollably and caused a swath of destruction and death all the way to Chengdu and beyond. The river needed to be brought to heel. Li Bing, after winning permission from the king of Qin, undertook what would in time be described as “the largest and most carefully planned public works project yet seen anywhere in the eastern half of the Eurasian continent.”

  To control the river, he decided to cut a new spillway and channel any excess water through it with a specially designed, adjustable diversion dam. It took him seven years to break through the mountain: he managed this by having workers burn piles of hay on the surface of rocks to make them hot, and then pour cold water to cool them down rapidly, letting the nearly instant contraction crack them open. This cutting eventually led to an opening seventy feet wide, and the Min River waters, which were shifted toward it by Li Bing’s clever fish-shaped dam, began to course through it the moment the final wall was broken open. The anniversary is still celebrated each year: a ceremony called the “breaking of the waters” is held every summer, commemorating an eastern engineering feat that was undertaken more than 2,000 years ago, when westerners (though not Plato, Aristotle, the Egyptians, or the Mesopotamians) still coated themselves with woad and did little more than grunt.

  Needham was fascinated by what he found at Dujiangyan. The engineering achievement was astonishing, its design was aesthetically pleasing, and its long endurance was remarkable. He also loved the architecture of the temples that had been built on the hillsides centuries ago to commemorate Li Bing’s work. He spent several pleasant hours gazing down at the river from a cool vantage point high on one of the pagodas in the forest.

  Then he met the modern director of the irrigation scheme, who was technically Li Bing’s successor. He encountered him walking around in the wet mist beside the main spillway, checking monitoring devices and reading water meters. He had a slide rule sticking out of his pocket and turned out to have been trained in Manchester. Needham said how impressed he was by the system—the spillway, the dams, the endless torrents of water—and all of it created so long ago. No wonder, he said, that they had erected a temple to Li Bing. “To us,” replied the director, smiling, “he was like a god. He surely deserved a temple.”

  Needham now turned north. His plan was to cross an outlier of the mountain range and head northwest to join the Silk Road—a route that could take him, in theory, all the way to Baghdad and to the Mediterranean at Antioch. Even this fairly modest leg of the journey turned out to be wretchedly difficult. His diary pages for the second and third weeks of August are filled with references to breakdowns, interminable waits, and unexpected disasters—interspersed, however, with a jocular perspicacity, as if despite the frustration he finds it all rather amusing and instructive:

  At 2.30 p.m. the alcohol gave out…changed the carburetor tops…took off feed pump, put grease between the leaves of the diaphragm…. Found 40 trucks waiting for the ferry so we put up in a little inn, open air. There was a storm alarm, and also a lunar rainbow…. Sir Eric in trouble with the gendarmerie for photographing a bridge. We are informed that the road is blocked and that we must wait. The hotel at Hanzhong was full, so off we went to the China Inland Mission22 and all of us were put up. Had an enjoyable visit to Bishop Civelli and his merry men.

  Needham’s enjoyment stemmed from his discovery that the bishop was Roman Catholic and conducted high mass each Sunday, in Latin. Needham and H. T. went along, Needham finding himself open-mouthed with delight—at seeing the entirely Chinese congregation lip-synching the Latin recitatives, and most of all at listening to sacred music he had last heard in his little church in Thaxted. He said he felt transported, back to medieval Europe, and back to Essex in the 1930s.

  But Needham’s greatest annoyance was the growing frequency of not being transported. At times his litany of woes—as when he tried to cross the Bao River, ten days out from Chongqing—would become a full-blown chorus:

  Arrived at [the ferry stop in] Wuguanhe at 10 a.m. Awful big washout. Lines of trucks and endless mulecarts there all day. Hopeless organisation. An incident officer should have been appointed with full charges for as far as the traffic jam extends on each side. Here again, like the rotten bridges on the Sichuan side [they had crossed into the province of Shaanxi, notorious for its inefficiency], surely far more men, money and effort ought to be spent on this great national northwest artery.

  Eggs and potatoes for supper. H. T. paid. Slept fairly well in and around the truck. During the night 100 more mulecarts came by and were only stopped at 3 a.m. by a driver behind us who drove his truck across the road.

  Had a lovely bathe about 5 a.m. in the river and a good breakfast. At about 8.30 a.m. an awful air force officer forced passage with four southbound trucks—had an awful job stopping southbound traffic: Ed was stationed at the top of the road and H. T. at the bottom while we brought our truck down, breaking a support on the way. We were ready to cross when miles and miles of army supplies on foot came through, cutting us short and making everyone wait. Finally got across at 12:10, a 26 hour delay.

  After several more days like this, Needham decided to call a halt. They stopped at the small town of Shuangshipu, nestling in a hollow in the hills eighty miles away from the Silk Road. He chose it for his caravanserai in part for simple convenience, and to get repairs for his truck’s newly broken spring. But he also stopped at Shuangshipu in the hope of seeing one of China’s more celebrated foreign residents—a man with the unusual name of Rewi Alley, who thanks to this brief stop would soon become a privileged member of Needham’s inner circle. “No better friend,” said Needham much later, of this formidable and controversial character, “and no more reliable colleague.”

  Rewi Alley could lay claim to many things—one of his biographical entries lists him as “writer, educator, social reformer, potter and Member of the Communist Party of China”—and is also undeniably the most famous New Zealander ever to have lived in China. He lived there for sixty years, becoming a mythic figure in his own lifetime, an intimate of the Chinese Communist leaders, a man regarded by his admirers as almost godlike and by his enemies as a charlatan, a traitorous propagandist, a libertine, and a pederast.

  He was remarkable-looking—short, stocky, sunburned, with legs like tree trunks. He had been named for a Maori chief and was the son of a schoolteacher and of a mother who was an early suffragist. He was a fanatic about keeping fit, an eager nudist, and—an admission made much of by his detractors—an unabashed homosexual.

  Alley first came to
China in 1927, impelled at least in part by his eager interest in young Chinese men (he had been sexually initiated by a soldier from Shandong whom he had encountered in France when both were serving in the final months of the Great War). He lived in Shanghai, a city that offered him a wide array of erotic amusements, and worked there first as a fireman, then as a factory inspector. During his ten years in the city he learned Chinese well-nigh perfectly, wrote volumes of homoerotic poetry, volunteered for famine- and flood-relief projects and other humanitarian causes in the countryside, and demonstrated a passion for social work and improving the lot of the ordinary Chinese. He left a distinct impression on all who met him—including, in the mid-1930s, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood.

  But in 1937, when the Japanese bombers struck targets in Shanghai and their troops overran the city, he fled. He went west, settling initially in the city of Hankou on the Yangzi. Here, the following year, in the company of Edgar Snow and his wife, Helen Foster (who was also known as Peg Snow and by her nom de plume, Nym Wales), and the secretary to the British ambassador (the ambassador in those days was the colorful Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, who wrote all his diplomatic dispatches with a quill), Rewi Alley sat down to help create a revolutionary new industry.